


silver cities rise

by endquestionmark



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-06
Updated: 2012-05-06
Packaged: 2017-11-04 23:12:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/399251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Hey,” Darcy protests, “I am so low-stress!”  She isn’t.  It’s total bullshit.  But there’s no way she’s letting Agent Suit trash-talk her.  “I am like wheatgrass smoothies and Zen tapes and Xanax in one handy social science-wrapped package.”</p><p> </p><p>Originally written anonymously <a href="http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/4305.html?thread=3078609#t3078609">at the kink meme</a> for the <a href="http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/4305.html?thread=2996177#t2996177">prompt</a>: "Because of her somewhat-decent skills at herding cats tazing gods and her knowledge of classified New Mexico-related information, Darcy is being trained as a SHIELD agent. They can't let her go but they can't find much of a use for her- until Banner needs a lab assistant. So she does the usual lab assistant-y things for him; coffee/tea gofer, note-taker, file filer, threat-to-life-limb-and-sanity-vanquisher, relaxation CD changer, etc.  Somewhere in there things get fluffy."  Bruce Banner works in a microbio lab, guys.  Now he does, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	silver cities rise

Darcy sits in the conference room, which is uncomfortable as hell - all shiny table that probably picks up fingerprints like nobody’s business and carpet that she is half-convinced is trying to eat her feet. Her chair is plasticky and squeaky. There’s a gorgeous view over Grand Central, but she got tired of leaving noseprints on the glass ten minutes ago.

She doesn’t even have her phone, because Mr. Suit took that away at the door. She’s not sure exactly how much of a security risk Temple Run poses, but whatever.

She looks around for something to do that doesn’t involve taking off her shoes and sliding down the conference table in her socks.

There’s a huge wingbacked chair - on a swivel, who even has chairs like that? - at the head of the conference table.

Ten minutes later, the door opens. “It seems like we’ve found a post for - Ms Lewis?”

She swings around in the giant leather chair. “Ah, Mr. Suit,” she says. “I’ve been expecting you.” She steeples her fingers in front of her nose and tries to look appropriately evil, but fails completely, because it isn’t just Mr. Suit. “Agent Cleary,” he says reproachfully. Fuck that noise, he’s Mr. Suit forever and a day, and the guy next to him is - Fluffy Hair? Oversize Kitten?

“This is Dr. Banner,” Mr. Suit says. Dr. Fluffy then. “You’re going to be his research assistant.”

“I hope he likes training assistants on the fly in that case,” she says.

“You said you were finding somebody low-stress,” Dr. Banner says to Mr. Suit. Agent Suit. Whatever.

“Hey,” Darcy protests, “I am so low-stress!” She isn’t. It’s total bullshit. But there’s no way she’s letting Agent Suit trash-talk her. “I am like wheatgrass smoothies and Zen tapes and Xanax in one handy social science-wrapped package.”

“Do you always talk like that?” Dr. Banner asks. “Because, you know, _Tony Stark_ was basically the alternative, and even _he’s_ shaping up to be less stress than you.”

“Only when somebody _takes my phone away_ and leaves me in a room with nothing to do for an hour,” she admits. “I was actually going to skid around on the table in a second or two, but then I decided to be Dr. Evil instead.”

“You’re mixing your movies,” says Agent Suit, of all people.

“Sorry,” she says, “did I mention that my _phone_ got taken away? My brain-to-mouth filter generally goes with it.”

“No,” Dr. Banner says dryly, “really?”

“See,” Darcy says to Agent Suit. “We’re going to get along _perfectly_.” And she hops up from the chair, slings an arm around Dr. Banner’s shoulders, and drags him right out of the room.

“Thank god,” she says in the hallway. “If I’d had to stay in there any longer I think I would have thrown a chair out the window or something.”

He laughs, but there’s something flat about it. “Did Cleary - give you any information about who I am, what my lab does, and so forth?”

Cleary? “Oh, Agent Suit,” she says. “Nope. But your hair is super fluffy. Can I ruffle it?”

He just raises an eyebrow at her. “I’ll let Mr. Stark debrief you in that case,” he says, and holds up her phone. “Text me when you’re done.” And just like that, he’s gone down the hallway, leaving her staring after him. And his fluffy hair.

“Be like that,” she says aloud, and goes to find her way to yet another of the identical conference rooms, plus a Tony Stark.

++

“Wait,” Tony Stark says, “he actually said ‘debrief’?”

“Yes,” Darcy says. Tony Stark actually gets to use his name, because honestly, what else would she call him? Maybe Sentient Beard. She decides to stop thinking about that before it escapes via her mouth. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean it like that, though. Does he even know what it means like that?”

“I don’t know,” Tony says speculatively, and she can just see the gears in his head turning as he gives the thought completely undue and excessive consideration. “I mean, would he Hulk out mid-sex? Things to consider, I suppose. I bet I could get R&D to make some sort of expanding polymer condom.”

Darcy chokes on her coffee, because even her brain only goes so far and apparently Tony Stark’s brain doesn’t know when to stop pushing the envelope, because right now the envelope is embedded in the wall and showing no signs of stopping.

“That’s a shit metaphor,” Tony says, and Darcy realizes she’s been talking aloud.

“Not really,” Darcy says. “Anyway, what you’re saying is basically he’s the Hulk, so I should avoid dropping coffees on him and so on?”

“Yeah,” Tony admits. “That was basically the gist of it. He’s got it pretty thoroughly under control, though. I jabbed him with a shock wand once and all he did was yelp. Sort of like a puppy.”

“I mean, the Hulk’s fingers are bigger than the average dick,” Darcy muses, then jerks sharply back to what Tony’s been saying. “Wait, sorry - you _shocked him_? He’s like a kitten! How could you shock that?”

“Pushing the envelope, huh,” Tony says. “Yeah, I poked him. It was sort of like when you accidentally spray a cat with a hose. Sorta cute in a _oh shit I’m about to be in trouble_ way.”

“No shit,” Darcy says in awe. “Remind me to, you know, _not do that_.”

++

Obviously this is why she picks up coffee on her way to the lab the next day. Because it isn’t inviting trouble or anything.

At least, it isn’t until her phone rings, and she tries to hold two paper cups in one hand, as well as the three files that Dr. Banner left for her to go over, and she manages to get it out of her messenger bag, which is of course right when Dr. Banner rounds a corner right in front of her and she actually manages to throw coffee in his face.

There’s a moment of shocked silence. Approximately three nondescript suits materialize nearby, quietly _not_ going for guns.

“Did you get sugar in this?” Dr. Banner asks mildly, rubbing coffee off his cheek with the heel of his hand and sniffing it.

“Yeah,” Darcy says. “Sorry, are you more a hot bitter type? Wait, shit, what did I just say?”

“You’re the judge of that,” Dr. Banner says, and goes right back around the corner.

“We’re okay,” Darcy says to the suits, “at least I think so, but if I start screaming then probably we’re not okay, okay? Okay.”

Then she flees into the lab and tries to smother herself in paper towels.

Luckily the files seemed to have survived, but her hoodie is pretty much a write-off. “Here,” Dr. Banner says, passing by, and dumps a lab coat on her head. Fair trade, she supposes.

“Hey, Dr. Banner,” she says, “can I call you Bruce? Because I just need to let you know - if I have to keep calling you Dr. then I’m going to call you Dr. Fluffy by accident sooner or later.”

He snorts. “Go right ahead,” he says. “Only one who calls me Dr. Banner is Colonel Fury -” he mimes an eyepatch “- and I think that’s just because first names are against his personal ethics or something.”

“Bruuuuuuuce,” she says, then tries to say it in a manner befitting an evil lab assistant. “ _Bruuuuuuuuce._ ”

“Something in your throat?” he asks mildly.

“Oh my god, are you smiling?” she says. “I didn’t think you did that. I thought you just, you know, made that flat bitter face. Poker-face.” She holds a hand flat in front of her mouth to demonstrate.

“Hot and bitter?” he says. “Wait, don’t answer that, I sound like Tony.”

“It’s not a good thing, either,” she says, shaking out the lab coat. “When do we start making mice glow in the dark?”

++

It turns out they already have mice that glow in the dark, for one, and for another, they simply couldn’t find somewhere else to put Darcy where she wouldn’t be the most destructive person in the lab. She ends up in the tiny office at the end of the lab, playing Minesweeper and filing endless rounds of paperwork. It isn’t that bad, though it is a bit dull for her taste.

That is to say - it’s a bit dull for her taste until the day one of the lab assistants accidentally ignites the oil they keep for the PCR machine, a loud relic of a thing. Regardless, it goes up like a torch.

From there, of course, it’s pretty much a crapshoot. It’s amazing how much of a lab is actually flammable.

Darcy, in her office with the door shut, doesn’t notice until the screaming starts.

She wonders idly which lab tech has let the mice out again, and wanders to the door to say something to that effect.

“I swear, James -” is as far as she gets, because she opens the door and black smoke comes rushing in and she reels back, eyes stinging. “James?”

Somebody screams in the rows of lab benches, and she takes a step out the door before reaching back and grabbing her coat, bundling it around her for whatever little good it’ll do.

“James?” she calls again. “Lee?”

And then something huge shifts in the smoke - she can hear the glassware shatter on the ground, see the billow of the smoke - and she remembers the damage reports from the helicarrier.

“Shit,” she says, very, very quietly, and shrinks back into the doorway.

There are more screams, the thunder of footsteps, and a door slams.

The door is on the far side of the lab.

But she’s damned if she’s going out quietly, hiding under her desk, so Darcy slides across to the wall, makes herself as small as possible, and starts inching past - she counts two fridges and three counters, so she has one more fridge and a filing cabinet and also a chemical hood to go before she’s out.

Her legs are shaking and her nails are biting into her palms.

She slides past the fridge, cold against her back.

The lab is very smoky and very silent, and she swallows hard past the sandpaper-dry rasp in her throat.

Flames flicker on the benches and the shelves above them, barely visible through the smoke, and she’s halfway past the cabinet when she hears a roar, and thumping footsteps, and her heart thrums in her chest.

She turns to run and makes it three steps before a massive hand catches her in the small of the back and her feet are slipping.

The wall comes up very fast, and she has just enough time to register the roar of the chemical hood exploding - but then there’s the wall, and there’s her ribs, and then, thank god, she passes out.

++

She wakes up to Natasha Romanoff, which she’s sure plenty of people have done, but then she also continues breathing, which is probably not so common.

“Fuck,” she says, which is not the ideal as concerns waking words, but then she feels as if she’s been hugged by an extremely enthusiastic boa constrictor, so it could be worse.

“You’re alive,” Natasha informs her. “In case you were wondering.”

“I actually was,” Darcy says, and pushes herself to something vaguely upright with her elbows. It hurts like _fuck_.

“You have two broken ribs and some pretty bad bruising,” Natasha says. “That’s the short version. We’ve wrapped your ribs and drained one hematoma, but besides that there aren’t any special care needs you should be aware of.”

“I can still take baths, right?” Darcy asks. “Because if I can’t take at least one bubble bath to soothe my battered soul then I don’t see the point of being a convalescent.”

“You can take baths,” Natasha confirms. She drags a cart over to the bed. “Breakfast,” she says, “and coffee, and painkillers. Jane’s been calling, so you should get back to her, and we’ll be - moving you to a different lab sometime next week. Until then take it easy. We’ll have a car waiting when you feel like going home.”

 _Home_ in this case is one of the condos in Stark Tower, below the wreckage of Tony’s penthouse, but still well above the skyline. Darcy eats her food and pops her pills and then manages to get home before the desire to redo her ceiling in blue shag carpeting overwhelms her.

“Jane!” she says cheerfully, lying flat on her back on the sofa.

“Darcy!” Jane says. “Oh my god, are you all right?”

“‘m fuzzy,” Darcy says, “but I’m okay. Hey, Jane, should I cover my room in beanbags? I think I should totally do it.”

“They have you on the good drugs, then,” Jane says, “that, or you’ve just been online for more than ten hours, I can’t tell.”

“Probably the drugs,” Darcy says. “But yep, I’m good. What about you?”

“I’m fine,” Jane says, “a bit bored, but fine. Just wanted to check in.”

“‘kay,” Darcy says. Her eyelids are suddenly very heavy. “I’m going to sleep now, so I’d better hang up before I drop the phone. See you, Jane!”

She rolls over, pulls the afghan down from the back of her sofa, and lets herself sleep.

++

Darcy spends a very, very bored week trying not to move her ribs too much and surfing the internet.

On Monday she gives up on staying home any longer and storms right into the middle of Agent Suit’s top-secret briefing and suddenly finds six Avengers staring at her.

“Well, why don’t you lock the door?” she snaps.

“Because you aren’t meant to know where we are,” Tony says. “Because we’re down two miles of tunnel, and we’re actually _under the Hudson River_ , so you aren’t actually meant to find us to begin with.”

“Your computer told me,” Darcy says, waving her phone. “He said he was going to upgrade my phone, and then he downloaded himself into it. Does that happen to you a lot?”

“More than you’d think,” Tony says, and then Agent Suit gets up and overrides both of them.

“If this is about your work,” he says, “I’ll send it to you tonight. Will that satisfy you?”

Tony is still staring at her phone. Natasha rolls her eyes and Clint grins at her, and Bruce - Bruce is, strangely, doing that strange flat-smile thing he did the first time they met.

“Thank you,” Darcy says, ignoring all of them, “now was that so hard?” She turns and if she swans out the door, at least it’s well-deserved, she thinks.

Then she gets lost somewhere under what is, from her estimation, SoHo.

++

The next day she finds her way to the lab, where there’s a surprising lack of Bruce.

“Where am I?” she asks the lab tech closest to the door.

“Dr. Richards’ lab,” he says, and that’s all she needs to hear before she’s straight out the fucking door like a shot.

“Jarvis,” she says to her phone, “please text Bruce from an anonymous number and ask him to meet me at the Starbucks on the corner of 42nd and Sixth Avenue.”

And then she burns up pavement all the way to Bryant Park because the alternative is finding Agent Suit and punching him right in his spook face.

++

“So,” she says, “was I doing a shit job of the paperwork or something? Because I know I’m not the best at actually reading directions but I’m pretty fucking good with forms, and it totally wasn’t me who set the lab on fire, I’m pretty sure that was James, and I definitely only let the mice out once and that was with all the doors shut and the lights off so that we could do a mouse scavenger hunt. Oh, my god, it was the time I accidentally shredded the reports, wasn’t it? That was an accident, I thought we were over that!”

“What,” Bruce says, looking disoriented and more than a little exhausted. “Could we start at the beginning?”

“Why am I working in Dr. Richard’s lab?” she asks. “Who is Dr. Richards? What does he do? Why am I not in your lab instead?”

Bruce takes a deep breath. “Because my lab still has scorch marks,” he says, “he’s Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four, he does a lot of engineering research, and - I don’t know, did you not notice the way you have _two broken ribs_ from working with me?”

“Wait,” she says, realization dawning. “Wait, rewind. You have a backup lab, I’ve seen it, but anyway. I was sort of busy hitting a wall, but didn’t the hood explode? Isn’t that sort of why you threw me at a wall?”

“You still have two broken ribs,” he says. “Exploding hood or no, you were the only person in the lab who got hurt beyond minor smoke inhalation.”

“So I’m a _liability_?” she says indignantly. “I was working in an _office_ with _paperwork_ , how much of a liability is that?”

“Enough of one for you to end up in danger,” he says, rubbing at his eyes. “That’s enough for me.”

“Oh,” she says. “Well, that’s sort of sweet, but in my previous job annihilation by giant Norse robots of doom was a very real risk, so - this is a cakewalk, all things considered.”

He laughs, surprised, and she thinks - _that’s a good look on you, you should smile more often_. She smiles. “So, is that a yes to letting me back?”

“Darcy Lewis,” he says, “life would certainly be a lot more boring without you.”

 _Agent Suit is crying in a corner somewhere_ , she thinks, and takes a triumphant sip of coffee.

++

She brings in coffee the next day.

“You didn’t pour it on me,” Bruce says from his post near the centrifuge. “That’s a first.”

“Please,” she says, “I only did that once, and it was definitely by accident.”

She sets the mug down next to him - no more Starbucks battery acid for her, they have a coffeemaker courtesy of Tony and she’s planning to thoroughly take advantage of it. He leans down to check the settings - their centrifuge is a clunky beast of a thing; it still has dials, for fuck’s sake - and on impulse she runs a hand through his hair.

He goes still, as if something is about to explode, which it doesn’t, thank god. Darcy teases out a few strands between her fingers. His hair is soft, and she thinks his eyes are closed, but she can’t tell. It’s a long, molasses-slow moment, and she doesn’t want to break it.

Until, of course, she does. “Oh my god, you’re Dr. Fluffy,” she says. “Why did you ever make me call you Bruce? You could have been Dr. Fluffy for months already!”

He straightens up, smiling. “I never actually enforced the ‘first-name only’ repeated infraction of professionalism,” he says. “You just sort of ran with it.”

Her hand is still raised, and she wants to trace it down along his cheekbone, his jawline. He’s still smiling, mouth turned up at the corners.

“Dr. Fluffy,” she mutters eventually, and returns to her new tiny office with her own mug. It’s gone cold. There’s a metaphor in that somewhere, she thinks, if she cared enough to find it.

++

“You did what,” Jane says, now back from her enforced island retreat.

“I think I sort of kissed him by accident,” Darcy says, face mashed into her pillow. She’s half-heartedly trying to smother herself so that she won’t have to go into work tomorrow.

“Start from the beginning,” Jane says, and it sounds like she’s stifling giggles.

The beginning is what happens when Darcy takes to sitting on Lee’s lab bench. Not the seat - the actual lab bench. Which means that her head is four feet above everyone else’s, which is well worth the actual safety risks. From then it only makes sense to leave her coffee mug on the shelves of chemicals, a foot above the bench and therefore above actual irradiation and annihilation.

Lee’s girlfriend is an artist, and it’s her first solo show, so Lee is texting her every five minutes in order to stave off a nervous breakdown.

“Let me see,” Darcy says, and leans down to snatch the phone from Lee’s hand.

“She’s crazy worried,” Lee says, blowing into a pair of gloves and snapping them on.

“If she’s not Damien Hirst she has nothing to worry about,” Darcy says, and texts something to that effect, passing Lee’s phone back. Lee smiles and puts it in her pocket.

“Hopefully the next text won’t be a defense of Hirst,” she says, “because if that’s what happens then you are completely responsible.”

“You’ll have to find me first,” Darcy says, and hops off the bench and back to her paperwork.

Approximately half a forest later, she realizes that she’s drooling a little and heads back out to find her mug and salvage her coffee.

“And I’m a super ninja, right?” Darcy says to Jane. “You know I’m a super ninja, I know I’m a super ninja. I tased Thor, for fuck’s sake! Super ninja!”

“Right,” Jane snorts. “Go on.”

“So Bruce was working at Lee’s bench now and I just wanted to reach up over his head and get my coffee,” Darcy says, and she could swear that Jane’s giggling. She’s going to find a way to reach right through the phone and whap her on the head if it kills her. “Oh my god, shut up, Jane.”

“Fghn,” says Jane.

“So I had the cup,” Darcy says, pushing bravely on, “and then he _turned around_ , Jane, he fucking _turned around_ and now I want to _die_!”

It sounds like Jane is actually sobbing on the other end of the line. “Ugh,” Darcy says with feeling, and throws the phone at the couch. When she’s judged that an appropriate amount of time has gone by, and Jane is probably not crying laughing anymore, she picks it up again.

“So was he that bad?” Jane says.

“What the fuck, I should never have picked up again,” Darcy says.

“It’s not the kiss that’s making you want to die, right?” Jane presses.

“It was barely a kiss,” Darcy moans into the sofa. “It was the _mortification_!”

“Uh huh,” Jane says, and then she starts howling with laughter again and Darcy has to hang up for her own good.

++

“Okay,” Darcy says from her swivelly chair in her tiny over-air-conditioned office. She’s been spinning in circles for the last ten minutes to keep her brain from overworking itself into a frenzy, and as a result the room is sort of spinning.

“Yes?” Bruce says, looking far too amused.

“So I - oh my god,” Darcy says, because she thinks her brain might have actually _shorted out_.

Bruce raises an eyebrow. “Do you want coffee,” Darcy mutters.

“Of course,” he says. “Was that it?”

“Yes,” she says, and then she blurts out “no,” just as he’s halfway out the door, and launches herself to her feet.

Except that she’s completely fucked her sense of balance by, oh, _spinning in a spinny chair for ten minutes_ , and she literally falls on him.

“Oh my god,” she says, “sorry about that, but okay, I think I might be sort of in love with you, but that’s probably coming on too strong, so can we just say that your smile is super amazing and kissing you wasn’t actually what made me leave early yesterday, and maybe throwing coffee at you was one of the best things that ever happened to me?”

“What,” he says, propping her semi-upright against the door frame.

“This is where you should say ‘stop talking’ and kiss me,” she informs him. The floor is still doing crazy things. It probably shouldn’t be sloping like that.

“If you insist,” Bruce says, smiling. “Stop talking.”

And he leans in. There aren’t fireworks, unless they count the tinkle of glass that’s Lee dropping her beaker, and there isn’t lightning, except for the fact that there’s a sizzle and then all the lights in the lab go out, but Darcy’s seen fireworks and she’s seen lightning and right now she’ll settle for Bruce’s smile and his soft lips against hers.

She smiles.

EPILOGUE

“So,” Tony says. “That stretchy condom offer still stands.”

“It’s okay,” Darcy says, aware of the way Bruce’s face is gradually turning pink. “We’ve - he’s got it under control.”

“I’ll bet,” Tony says, looking at them speculatively. Steve clears his throat.

“You have no idea,” Bruce says, and Steve chokes and Tony grins. Natasha rolls her eyes and yelps as Clint kicks her under the table. Thor - well, he’s Thor, isn’t he, he’s seen it all.

“Motherfuckers,” Fury says, but he almost sounds fond, so that’s all right then.

**Author's Note:**

> Now with [absolutely gorgeous art](http://artgyrl.deviantart.com/art/Dr-Fluffy-317312127) by [artgyrl!](http://artgyrl.deviantart.com/) Go on and check it out, it's really beautiful.


End file.
